


Welcome to the Rest of Your Life

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: But The Game Didn't Take Losing Very Well, But kind of not, F/F, F/M, Feelings, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, They Won the Game, This Is Not a Star Trek Rip Off, Who Told You Dat, kind of Sadstuck, lots of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:38:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat wakes up in a crater and thinks that this time, he'd like to try building something for real.  If he can make it.  Honestly, he's just not sure he's strong enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome to the Rest of Your Life

                The game ended. They won. They won, and Karkat would even call it winning, watching the ghosts of his friends melt back into bodies with colored pupils and feet that touched the floor. Four, four, twelve, and twelve.

                Karkat would need to cry a lot more tears to make it add up.

                The game made a door and this time it wasn’t just Karkat who moved. Thirty two hands reached through, together.

                Karkat’s wet eyes closed and he told himself that this time, it was going to be so different.

 

                Karkat sat up choking—what the everfuck; why did victory feel like having your lungs teased out and folded around your face? He sucked in more air just to prove that he could, observing that he was in a fucking enormous crater. Okay. But his bones weren’t broken, and in fact, he wasn’t bleeding. He’d been bleeding from the final fight. Claiming the prize must have changed things.

                He clawed his way out of the crater quickly, scrambling up the gritty walls to see what the new universe looked like. Dark sky, unfamiliar stars, trees swaying all around him. The smell of rain and honeyvine.   It was cool out, but comfortable, and Karkat’s throat closed. It looked like Alternia.

                And there were no other craters around him. None at all.

               

                It wasn’t really Alternia. A quick glance at a stream had revealed that Karkat still looked mostly like himself—better than he expected, given Lalonde’s estimations about how the universe would respond to two separate dimensional species trying to make a world together. His horns were still there but his teeth were flatter, and his eyes were lividly red, enormous irises ringed in gold, with whites in the corners if he looked far enough to the side. He wasn’t _any_ taller. Dammit.

                His palmtop didn’t work. He kept flicking it on, hoping to see—but there was nothing but static. Incompatible technology, maybe. Or maybe it was broken. Or maybe this world was uninhabited.

                Maybe that was Karkat’s prize. For all the times he ranted and railed against the company of the imbeciles he was around, maybe the game had taken that to heart and impris— _gifted_ him with a planet all his own, where he would never see any of the people he cared about again.

                _You better not have done this to all of them_ , Karkat thought, stumbling blindly through the trees, growling and swiping at his new eyes. Apparently they were still capable of salinous discharge. _You_ —the fucking game— _had better not have listened to me over the voices of thirty-one smarter, better kids and decided that they all needed to be isolated._ No. It wouldn’t have happened like that. It _couldn’t_ have.

                Karkat fell to his knees when he finally saw a cityscape peeking through the tree boughs.

                Just sat in the mud and cried with relief, and for the first time since the game had started, all the tension broke and Karkat couldn’t begin to move. He sat there for hours, vomiting feelings, crying himself into quite possibly critical dehydration, biting his lip bloody to stifle screams of fury and defiance and exhaustion. Oh god, he was so tired. He didn’t know what this world would want from him, but he could see people bustling, and there were no drones, no fights that he could see, no bloodshed.

                Before he could get his jellied legs under him to go investigate what exactly he was dealing with—the tension didn’t want to climb back up; he was left feeling weak and pathetic—an unfamiliar face was staring down at him. Karkat blinked upwards with eyes swollen enough to make getting them open hard.

                “Are you okay?” She touched Karkat’s shoulder. He stared at her blankly, at the unique mix of human and troll that characterized her—she was carrying logs, enough of them to crush a human, but her face was soft with a concern so genuine Karkat wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t spent so many sweeps among the squishy pink apemen.

                His mouth opened. “I don’t know where I am,” Karkat said hoarsely. Another tear slipped from his eye, like he really was just a grub. “I’m… I’m lost.”

                “What? Oh no! Do you want me to help you? Here—” She shifted the logs in her grip and pulled out a pack of tissues. Unrecognizable brand. They were orange.

                Karkat stared up dully. You never accepted help from people you didn’t know really fucking well, in his experience. And half the time they still turned out to be evil, or mind-controlled—or like Kankri, with the wrong interests at heart and no time to listen to other voices.

                But he was all alone, coming off of fighting for his life for so long. And Karkat was just fucking exhausted. What did the universe have _left_? What new horror could it possibly throw at him after making him stand witness to how everything burned?

                “Yeah,” Karkat said. “Please.”  


                This place—Antenglish (which Karkat found privately hilarious in the way that involved hysterical laughter and then having to control his breathing before he passed out)—really wasn’t bad. The people here called themselves trolls or humans depending on their occupations, get _that_. Karkat got himself branded as a troll right off the bat, from how he acted—nervous, jumpy, and vicious if provoked. It took him a while to work up the courage to ask for that to be changed. He wanted to be different. If he could. He wanted to be better.

                “It’ll take some work,” said Ayla, who had been more or less appointed Karkat’s keeper since she found him. They seemed to think he had brain damage. Watching them convinced Karkat that they were right.

                This society was the best of Earth, Alternia, and Beforus.   It was peaceful and fascinatingly intrepid at once—Tenglans quested through space constantly, discovering new worlds and peoples. They explored and with the mission of learning from every discovery. Not trying to take over, not trying to convert, half of the time bent on keeping their missions totally secret from the native populations. They had open votes to every citizen when a world was discovered to have a difficulty—poverty, violence, radiation—about whether they would try to correct the problem in one of their ten year mission paradigms.

                They let Karkat vote. Ayla made a noise of approval as he all but stabbed the Aid button. A world full of violence over insufficient resources? Aid, aid, aid.

                “You could do it,” she said. She was on her way to jam with her moirail—these people still had moirails, and Karkat didn’t know if that made him want to cry himself sick more or less. Ayla hovered in the doorway of Karkat’s apartment (he’d been _given_ this place, granted for as long as he needed to figure out what he wanted to do from here. They didn’t want anything in return). “You have a gentle heart, Karkat. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would have raised you a troll.”

                Karkat was working on laughing instead of the awful sound that made other people flinch. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

                By the third month he’d taken the assessments and was officially declared human. It was the weirdest fucking thing. From the options arrayed in front of him, Karkat realized what he wanted was to just. Take care of things. Be surrounded by life and not have to know it was going to die, or that he couldn’t protect it, or that they’d all been doomed from the beginning. They had aquariums here, places devoted to learning and research on underwater life. They had crustaceans he recognized and a thousand creatures he didn’t. He had to go back to school for it. He did. He got a job in the meantime too; it was pretty trollish work, building houses, but it came more easily that taking up counseling or food preparation or gardening.

                Kanaya. Kanaya would have almost certainly have been a human, with her artistry and her plants.

                Karkat had looked many times. Craters, amnesia patients, their names, their chumhandles, anything. _Anything_.

                He was surrounded with people willing to care about him, wanting to care for him. And he was so fucking alone.

 

                Trolls and humans alike had various blood colors. Karkat’s wasn’t unusual at all. It was his behavior that made him a mutant. And the Tenglans responded to it by huddling around him and trying to heal him. He received enough pale propositions to make his head spin, and Ayla had to step in to tell them off. “He’s already got a moirail,” she scolded. “Stop, you’re making him uncomfortable.” It didn’t do much to make the people around him stop crawling all over Karkat and _doing_ shit for him, but at least he wasn’t left flushed and spluttering as someone said they were diamonds for him.

                He thanked Ayla later and she gave him a long look. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Her eyes were always hard to look at. By now Karkat knew why it was so easy to trust her, why he’d trusted her since she found him on the hill. It wasn’t quite the right shade of blue, but it was close. “You have a family.” As he blinked, she shrugged a shoulder. “I can tell. It shows on your face, sometimes. When we remind you of them.”

                “Had,” Karkat corrected quietly. “I’m pretty damn sure they’re gone now.”

                Ayla laid a hand over his chest, against the slow, exhausting beat of his heart. Her eyes were very soft. “ _Have_ ,” she said.

                Karkat hadn’t been in the practice of crying since that first week, but it made his throat close up anyway. “Yeah, okay,” he rasped. “I need to. I need to study.” _I need to be by myself because I’m sick of crying in front of people._

                Oh god, oh god, oh god, they were the worst of shits, they’d caused him so much trouble, his life was so much simpler without them and Karkat missed every last one of his friends so hard it hurt. He wanted to see them in this world. Wanted to see them picking themselves up and putting themselves back together. Wanted to participate in it.

                And knew that he was alone as fuck, because he’d finally found Aradia.

                In a history text.

                She was a famous archeologist and anthropologist, who contributed more to Altenglish’s ancient history than any other human on record. And after she was done uncovering six lost cities in the middle of a scorching desert—a desert that was now one of the most thriving, fertile areas in Altenglish, thanks to the revival of ancient irrigation techniques—she’d gone on to journey through space and explored at least a dozen new worlds. Probably more. Aradia was renowned for being a little impulsive and bent the rules more often than not. She’d had a moirail whose name Karkat couldn’t dig up, and been married to two trolls whose names he didn’t recognize.

                She’d died three hundred sweeps ago, at almost ninety-four years old. So much longer than she would have lived as an Alternian rustblood. She’d died setting up and activating the forcefield that shielded and saved an entire planet from an exploding star. She’d saved over four billion lives. There were holograms of her on record.

                She was beautiful. Her eyes sparkled with life, in a way Karkat had never really gotten to see in the game. Her cheeks and eyes were lined with laughter, her hair in flyaway curls like the mane of an empress, and rings sparkled on her fingers. Her adult horns had come in, and they were every bit as impressive as she’d used to brag they would be on Trollian, when they were kids.

                She had been happy. Thank god, she had been happy in the end.

                Karkat found two more of them—maybe three; there was an ancient king on record who sounded suspiciously like Gamzee, if Gamzee wasn’t crippled by addiction and highblood chucklevoodoos and abandonment. The name was lost in translation, but reading about the City of Merriment and the cult of miracles—which had devoted itself to medical research and _fucking cured cancer_ —and the fact that the texts traced moirallegiance back to this time period, Karkat was almost entirely sure. Unlike Aradia, Rose, and Tavros, there weren’t holograms on record of this king. So there was no way for Karkat to see his moirail’s face again.

                They’d all lived such good lives, and Karkat was so, so _proud_ of them. He had to do better for them. He had to take what the game had given him and make it worthwhile. Had to. Had to make something of himself, like he’d always sworn he would, back before the game made nothing matter but survival. Back when Karkat had been just a mutant hiding in his hive, waiting for a chance to be the hero.

                The first step to that, Karkat knew, was not looking for them anymore because it was killing him.

                It was pretty obvious what the game had done. It had given them their perfect world to share and dumped them all across its timeline. One final farewell fuck you. And with every voice and face and typing quirk Karkat realized he would never find again, he found himself three steps back for every two taken, cringing into himself with loneliness. Pathetic. They were so much stronger than him. He couldn’t let them down.

                It took a long time for him to be okay with doing it, but little by little, Karkat turned off the computers, stopped the universal search programs he had running. Returned the holodiscs that told their stories and showcased their bravery. Tried to fit himself into his own life. Home. This was home now. He belonged here, just like they had. He could do this. Karkat Vantas did not have it in him to just sit on his hands and wait to stop hurting.

                Ayla caught him with one of the last ones. With—Kanaya, he’d had to check. He’d found her. The texts shitting themselves over Rose Lalonde’s contributions to fiction and the science of physics dissolution didn’t mention Kanaya, but they’d been close enough to each other in the timeline that they could have met. Karkat was almost certain that they had. Some anonymous rich patron had jump-started Kanaya’s entry into the fashion industry. And the year Rose died—passing on peacefully in her sleep—Kanaya had taken a break from all her responsibilities and travelled the world alone. In the seventy sweeps more Kanaya had lived, she had never married, but always worn a simple ring on her left hand.

                Karkat wished he could have been there for her that year. Wished he could have put his arms around her and told her it was alright. She’d carried on, of course—she was Kanaya. Karkat wasn’t surprised to realize that his wardrobe had been steadily incorporating her classical designs. He could tell what was hers by how comfortable it felt, by how relaxed in made him. A hug back through time from her to him. The poetry Kanaya had written had talked about love and family and friendship and Karkat had read the poems all about a hundred times, smiling helplessly, because she’d found a way to be happy too, with about a hundred wrigglers, an orphanage all her own where Karkat had no doubt that every last of her grubs had felt loved and safe.

                She’d died five years ago. Just _five_. If she’d held on, Karkat could’ve—

                But he needed to let go. And that was where Ayla found him, waiting outside the library terminals. Karkat was searching for the willpower to turn Kanaya’s holodisc in. Ayla didn’t comment on Karkat’s bloodshot eyes, or why he would possibly want to freeze his ass off on a park bench for the better part of two hours. Wordlessly, she took the disc and looked at it for a moment before handing it back to him.

                “Not Lady Lalonde this time?” She asked. “I thought you were researching her.”

                “No,” Karkat said hoarsely. “No, I think—I think I’m done with research. I think it’s time I do my own thing for a while.”

                Ayla looked at him for a long while (Karkat avoided her eyes; they were so blue and his heart was squeezing in his chest). “Lady Lalonde had some interesting theories on physics dissolution,” she pointed out. “I’ve always been fascinated by the levitation studies.” Karkat nodded, not really up to talking. Sometimes Ayla did that for him—filled the air with words so he wouldn’t have to listen to the emptiness of his head. He appreciated it. “And time travel. I’ve been doing some reading on the subject.”

                When she didn’t go on, Karkat looked up. Ayla gazed at him steadily. She had her hand on his. Karkat felt a tremor go down his spine and set his jaw, squeezing his eyes shut. He didn’t say anything.   She hugged him just as quietly, slowly becoming as cold as he was as they sat on the bench, just right there against him. When Karkat shifted away, he walked the steps and returned Kanaya’s disc with shaking hands. Ayla was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.

                “There’s a whole world waiting for you,” she said softly.   “If you’re ready to meet it.”

                Karkat took a deep breath. He figured trying to be was the first step. He walked down the stairs.

 

                His first day at the aquarium was almost, but not quite, like coming home. Surrounded with life and learning how to preserve and promote it. Being given his first study assignments. Touching the exoskeleton of a crab for the first time since his lusus died. Karkat found himself smiling all day. He didn’t even mind education detail, herding children around from tank to tank and battering his way through the barrage of their questions. He tried to curse less. No one seemed to mind.

                His second day surprised him by making him smile again. Call him crazy, but Karkat was noticing a trend.

                Some days were rougher than others, though. The bad ones were where Karkat didn’t want to get out of bed. Felt sick with some kind of black guilt, like moving on, like caring about something other than the people he’d lost was the worst crime imaginable. Like if he just lay there and rotted, that would be the only acceptable thing.

                He was forgetting them, bit by bit. Forgetting to ache for them. Forgetting to cry. He didn’t have the right to smile—and that was when he’d call for Ayla, practically his surrogate moirail at this point. She would come every time without fail and somehow convince him to get his ass up and go to work. She never seemed to begrudge him it. She said she was proud of him.

                And on the days between those awful ones, Karkat was proud of himself.

                She’d done so much for him, and when he heard that her request to join space exploration had been approved, he was nothing but happy for her. He smiled the worry out of her eyes and hugged her until they were both as warm as could be. “You’ll do great,” he promised. “I’ll be hoping for your mission’s success.”

                “You could come with us,” Ayla said, a little desperately. “I could put in an application requesting you be approved as family. You could—“

                But no. Karkat smiled ruefully, shaking his head. He was building something here. Building himself. Trying to figure out who he was and he couldn’t leave the job half-finished. Ayla smiled back after a moment. “I’m so proud of you,” she said again. “Karkat, I won’t have to pray for your success. You’re the most stubborn human I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

                And she was gone.

                And Karkat was alone.

                He thought it would hit him harder than it did—was braced for crying spells and apathy too deep to fight. And it did hurt; she wasn’t the only one leaning pale towards him. He missed Ayla. She was his closest friend here. But, in the end, Karkat was alright. He had work to distract him, and after a while the aquarium was the center of his world. He was running half a dozen research projects at once, had already been given interns because of his competency. Half of the animals recognized him and followed him around, and pretty much he was eternally requested for education duty, because apparently people between five and sixteen really liked Karkat or something. He was happy.

                He was midway through a lecture on the skeletal system of inserina octopodes when he saw a new kid come in and froze in his tracks. Karkat completely forgot what he was saying. The kid was barely up to Karkat’s knees, couldn’t have been more than eight years old, and was being herded after a tall woman—troll, clearly. Just look at how she walked.

                And Karkat didn’t know how this worked, since he’d been under the belief they’d all been shipped out fully-formed and dumped in craters, but that tiny, shuffling kid was unmistakably, rock in his stomach, hands-shakingly _Sollux Captor_.

                Karkat muttered a quick order for his assistant to take over and was halfway across the room before Sollux looked up. His eyes—gold through and through—went huge, and Karkat didn’t even see him move, just felt impact and looked down to Sollux clinging to his, yep, knees. Karkat didn’t think twice about scooping him up and hugging the shit out of him.

                Sollux promptly bawled into his shirt, and Karkat could hear himself laughing like a lunatic, probably about to get himself carted off by security as Sollux lisped out a truly creative set of insults—either the kid was really bright for his age, or there was an adult’s mind stuck in the wriggler body. The woman who Sollux had been with stared at Karkat, who tried to assure her to that he wasn’t doing anything too bad, but Sollux had achieved a death grip around his neck and it made speaking rather impossible.

                Karkat had never been so happy in his life.

                Sollux, as it turned out, was found wandering around in a crater—too small to get out, Sollux relayed to Karkat, still half-hysterical. No psiionics and these fucking retarded stubby arms and legs—which made him an orphan. Not an orphan like Karkat, with no family—but an _orphan_. Helpless and thrust into the control of others because a kid couldn’t take care of himself. The childcare services of Antenglish were flawless, Karkat had no idea how to take care of a wriggler, and he didn’t rest until the adoption papers were signed and Sollux was walking into his hive, muttering about where the computers would go and how his bed should be facing away from the window, and basically being the same little shit Karkat had known all his life. He couldn’t stop hugging Sollux. Considering the death grip those tiny fists made against his back, he wasn’t the only one.

                The game had apparently decided to screw Sollux over more than most, by dumping him into a wriggler body. There was no telling why it’d retarded his age, but it was obviously frustrating to him. Sollux couldn’t get anyone but Karkat to take him seriously, and was stuck being sent to school for subjects he could have done in his sleep. Karkat got him tested out of as much as he possibly could. Once Sollux was sitting in classrooms with kids three times his size, bored out of his mind, and Karkat began to get shut down on the basis of Sollux needing to be socialized (he didn’t need socialization. He was a traumatized child soldier trapped in an unfamiliar body—he needed to rest, he needed his computers, and he needed Karkat), he managed to get around it by ‘homeschooling’ Sollux. Karkat herded him around with the other kids at the aquarium. Sollux’s homeschooling mostly consisted of Sollux trying to teach them both how to use Antenglish’s computer systems.

                Karkat messaged Ayla too. Just to say that he’d adopted a wriggler. Judging from the message she sent back, she knew it was more than that.

                It was the first time in Karkat’s life that he’d felt like he’d been outright blessed. Like Vriska’s dice. It would be awkward while Sollux was so shrunken, but Karkat wasn’t alone anymore. He had the computer loser and god, it was so much more than he’d dared to hope for. His best friend. They’d face this world together.

                Karkat’s research in how far and wide they’d all been scattered told him this was not a thing that fucking happened. He couldn’t stop prodding the kid to make sure he was real. And that was where Sollux worked the kid angle—no one would tell him off for clinging. Karkat held him through the crying spells and the rages, they talked about things and laid them to rest, he kept Sollux sane and Sollux made him so much _better_. The place where Karkat lived had effortlessly become home because of who he was sharing it with. Sollux was unofficially one of his interns. He and Karkat ran projects together; like what they would have done if Alternia didn’t pit everyone against each other (also, it helped that Karkat sucked a lot less at biological sciences than he did at coding).

                He could tell that Sollux wanted to go off-world, and Karkat would decide whether he’d come along when Sollux met the age requirements. They were both independent, and that wasn’t changing. But right now they needed each other.

                Right now it was all okay.

                “Listen, I know I can’t do anything official when I look like a fucking teletubby,” Sollux said over dinner at one point, frustrated enough with his small fingers that the chopsticks had been abandoned and he was just stuffing noodles into his mouth by hand. “But how much would it freak you out if I said I’m pale for you? I know you have Gamzee, but I’ve always—“

                Karkat dropped food all over his lap. He was graceful like that. Sollux blinked at him, eyes large and nervous, and then began to smile back. “God, you’re such a fuckup, KK. You need me. Admit it.”

                “I fucking do,” Karkat said, and held out his fingers. Sollux blushed a little, completing the diamond with his own. They threw noodles at each other and made a mess like moirails of the highest order. Sollux abandoned his bed to hog the blankets in Karkat’s, squashed up to him and snoring relentlessly. Pale pity made butterflies through every inch of Karkat.

                It made him think of Gamzee a little bit, and all of Gamzee’s attempts to convince Karkat about miracles. “They’re like butterflies,” Gamzee had said, which made Karkat snort. “No, really bro. One hatches and there’s your miracle, and if you pay it some attention, it’ll multiply. Till you’ve got so many miracles they fall through your fingers and you start trailing them after you, giving your holy joys out to the people you love.”

                “How’s that working out for you?” Karkat said acidly, because they were in-game, because everything was wrong and everyone was a killer. Gamzee had caught Karkat’s head between his paws and grinned at him—it was back when Gamzee was still sweet. Before the moirallegiance began to crack around the edges and that fucking puppet poisoned Gamzee’s head again. It was the most romantic moment of Karkat’s life up until that point. He held his breath, staring, sarcasm deserting him.

                “I got such a bounty of miracles right now,” Gamzee told him, a laugh in his voice. “You don’t even know, brother. I’m leaving them all over for you, but maybe you just can’t tell cause they’re all Karkat-shaped and you don’t like looking at things that way.”

                Karkat got it a little bit now, with Sollux purring against him and a future stretching out that he was looking forward to. He was looking forward to waking up, to trying again, to realizing the destiny he’d never been offered before. He had so many miracles. So much happiness. It felt like he would fly apart from it.

                And Sollux was good for him too, not just because of not being alone or because it was pale, but because Karkat had his best friend back. Sollux was a very different person, and he pushed Karkat out of the comfortable, well-traced paths he’d grown familiar with. “We’re not humans,” Sollux sneered at him at one point—Karkat grimaced back, just as ugly. Sollux was a troll, but Karkat wasn’t. Sollux stretched his cheeks out, making his face all the more demented. “But we’re not trolls either, KK. We’ve gotta be a little bit of both.”

                Sollux tempered the peaceful life Karkat had made for himself with dragging Karkat to the shipyards and the programming hubs, and even the defense force rallies, although neither of them were too into that. When one of Antenglish’s greatest ships made its return voyage, Sollux pestered Karkat to no end, until he agreed to put up with the massive crowd. Sollux perched on his head to avoid being crushed. And Karkat put up with getting elbowed and stepped on to watch spacey assholes disembarking.

                It was pretty damn cool. Sollux was a smug little shit about it too. “We’re not discussing this until you’re at least above the crew height requirement,” Karkat told him sternly. Sollux just grinned. “Fuck you, Captor. In a week neither of us are going to give a shit about space exploration.”

                A week later they were pouring over star charts, figuring out where hadn’t been explored.

                At the aquarium, lots of the spaceship’s crew came in to visit and take tours. Sollux snuck close and tried to quiz them about exploration, ignoring Karkat’s glares. Sollux was getting more comfortable with being mistaken as a child. He knew how to work the fucking cute to get people to buy into his innocent act and start getting close to releasing classified secrets. It was pretty impressive to watch, actually.

                It was also going to get Sollux into trouble sooner or later, but Karkat wasn’t going to try to control him. Karkat had learned his lesson about that with his last failure of a moirallegiance. He was there for Sollux and he’d jam out whatever with him, but Sollux was going to make mistakes. Karkat would leave him to it. His job was to be there to shield him when shit came crashing down.

                And so, when Sollux started tugging on his pants leg, whispering Karkat’s name urgently, Karkat heaved a sigh and turned, expecting to need to talk Sollux out of some trouble.

                Blue, and he almost thought of Ayla because of it before he realized that the shade wasn’t quite right.

                No.

                No, that was just it. The shade was perfectly right.

                “KK,” Sollux said, voice so smug it was a wonder he didn’t combust. “I’d like you to meet Captain John Fucking Egbert of the expedition vessel _Casey_.”

                Gamzee was laughing in Karkat’s ear. _Miracles just keep multiplying, right? I told you, brother. I told you so many times._

                John almost looked scared—Karkat knew the feeling, like having the rug taken out from under him, like being so afraid the universe would decide it was too much and take it back. He stumbled a step forward. “You’re fucking with me?”

                Oh damn, that smile. Karkat’s heart broke apart. John laughed, a tear going down his cheek as he smashed into Karkat, arms hugging him tight, and they were stumbling like they were spinning. Sollux squawked, skittering away as Karkat sank his claws into the fucking douchebag jacket John was wearing and refused to let go because this miracle was fucking his, no matter what. John was so fucking warm. And he smelled just right. So much bigger than Karkat was used to—but it had been sweeps, hadn’t it. Sweeps for Karkat, no telling what it had been for John.

                “Karkat,” the human was chanting against his throat, squeezing him too tight to breath. “It’s you, it’s real, you’re here.”

                Karkat swallowed. “ _Yeah_.” He could feel John’s shoulders hitch.

                “I looked—I looked everywhere—“

                “John,” Karkat choked, damned sure he was trying to climb straight into the human’s skin, surround himself with that bloodpusher, never leave the safety of him. “I’ve got you.”

                “Don’t let go,” John breathed into him.

                “I’ll never let go,” Karkat said back, and they were both howling with laughter, slumping into each other, shivering like they were descending into hypothermic shock because it was warm, because Karkat was breaking in two with happiness, because John Egbert had found him across space and time—against all odds—for the second time in his life.

                “Gross,” Sollux informed them. “Are you guys gonna have sloppy makeouts all day, or can we do something that doesn’t make me want to gag?”

                 They weren’t fucking making out! Karkat growled at his moirail, lifting his head to shoot Sollux a warning look. It was somewhat undermined by the fact that a blush was spreading over his face. Wow, John was close. And wow, he smelled good. And Jegus fuck, was there a limit to how many times Karkat could talk himself out of this crush and have it come skulking back against his will? Because they were officially looking at five here.    

                John laughed a little awkwardly and Sollux totally failed to be even slightly apologetic. The fucker. John and Karkat disentangled themselves, edging away and then darting closer again. Karkat didn’t know if the sentiment was returned, but he felt like if he wasn’t touching John right now, everything would evaporate. John slung an arm around him and pinned Karkat to his side.

                “We should talk,” Karkat said, meaning _, I don’t think there should be a span of time where one of us isn’t working his facegash for the next forty-two hours._ They had a lot of catching up to do.

               

                John was a troll. Karkat found this endlessly funny. The scowl he was getting, complete with the pale blush, just made it even better. “Are you done yet?” John demanded, drumming his fingers on the table. “You’re not funny at all.” Karkat sank out of his seat in hysterics. He had John and Sollux both snickering within the next ten seconds.

               

                “You know,” Sollux said. “I bet it’s a lot harder to keep track of schoolfeeding and socialization and all that bullshit up in space.” As Karkat glanced at him—they were in Karkat’s place again, John having gone back to his ship, getting ready for bed. It was massively late, and all three of them would have to be up and functioning on about three hours of sleep. Karkat didn’t think anyone cared.

                “Just saying,” Sollux said innocently.

 

                John was at the aquarium every day. And if he played one more prank—

                Yeah, okay, Karkat would screech at him and end up hugging the fuck out of him in sheer delight because he’d missed this, missed him, missed John so much.

 

                “You know,” Karkat’s supervisor said. “Your research projects are all well under way. You’ve trained your interns very well. They could probably take over.”

                Karkat glanced up from where he was compiling the latest data observations. He had his palmtop open beside the main terminal, beeping continuously as John sent him steadily more ridiculous messages. He’d taken Sollux out for ice cream. In retrospect, given the fact that Sollux had a child’s metabolism and John was John, this was always doomed to end badly.

                “Ma’am?”

                “Just saying.”

 

                “I got my latest set of orders today,” John said. Karkat’s chest went tight. He didn’t look up from the book in his lap.

                “…Oh?”

               “I’ll be shipping out in a month,” John said. Sollux, strewn over Karkat’s shins like a particularly bony blanket, sat up, throwing Karkat a look (that Karkat powerfully ignored). “Uncharted space. It should be really exciting.”

                “Sounds it,” Karkat replied, turning a page. He hadn’t caught any of the words on the last one. There must have been some kind of delay. His hands were shaking.

                John caught one of them in his own hand and Karkat jumped, glaring at him, stomach in knots as John gave him a sheepish smile. “I, uh, also happen to have somehow gotten some forms. For a marine specialist biologist position aboard that just happens to be open, and.” He cleared his throat. “You know. A few other forms that would allow said biologist to take aboard a cherished family member. Who might be able to take a few aptitude tests and be cleared for some basic tech work.”

                “ _KK_.” Sollux’s voice promised death.

                “If you say ‘just saying’, so help me god, I will punch your face in,” Karkat said, voice strangled. His hand was, after all, squeezing John’s so tight it made his wrist numb. It wasn’t something he was trying to do, nor was it something he could fight. John’s thumb ran calmingly over his knuckles. He was here. He was asking Karkat to go with him.

                “If you start making out, I’m leaving,” Sollux declared. Without looking, Karkat aimed a kick at him. Ugh, for the last time, no, that was not what they were doing here. And John could quit egging him on, turning all red like that. The shithead.

                “Give me the damn forms,” Karkat grumbled. “You won’t take no for an answer anyway.”

                John brightened. “It’s funny you say that, because they’re already filled out and everything, but this way I won’t have to forge your signature!” He beamed blindingly. Karkat failed to impart any sort of disapproval.

                “I will seriously leave!” Sollux protested as John hummed into Karkat’s shoulder, arms wrapped tight.

 

                Karkat’s room was mysteriously adjacent to the captain’s quarters. And John’s ship was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen. An amalgamation of human aesthetics and familiar troll technology. Karkat took one look around and realized this was it.

                For the first time in his life, he was really and truly home.

 

                A month into the mission and Karkat had never been run so ragged or so fucking happy about it. He was busy all the time, focusing his attention on organisms and findings that didn’t even seem to make logical sense. His knack for strategy had Karkat’s ass being rotated into the tactics department every other day and he was being trained in Antenglish weaponry so they could stick him on the defense detail too. They’d already added him to the security reserves, clearing him to head down to the planet with the others. He and John made the same fucking awesome team they had in game. Like a well-oiled machine, they covered each other, read each other’s movements, and balanced out impulses of flight and fight.

                They played hard, studied hard, fought hard, and everyone on this ship was fucking weird. You could tell they were John’s hand-picked recruits. No one batted an eye about Karkat, the human-troll, or the fact that Sollux had decided now was the right time to start laying the pale PDA on thick and Karkat looked like he had an eight year old moirail. Maybe it was the fact that the crew acknowledged Sollux for his abilities (Sollux was practically running the computer department). Maybe it was the fact that for some reason, people kept deciding that they liked Karkat. The fact that the captain had attached Karkat to him like Karkat was vital to ongoing survival—that did get mentioned. Sollux’s teasing had taken root in fertile ground.

                “For the last time,” Karkat growled for the hundredth fucking time this week, refusing to pull his hand away because he fucking liked holding John’s hand, okay? He was allowed to do that. Nothing was trying to kill them, they were enjoying the scenery after a well-deserved sample-gathering, and if Treven didn’t stop wolf-whistling at him, Karkat was going to get physical. “WE ARE NOT DOING SHIT.” 

               

“You’re making out with your souls,” said Keev, nodding. “I can see it. I must be telepathic.” John snorted.

                “Karkat is my buddy,” he drawled, and flopped his arms around Karkat’s neck, dragging Karkat into his chest. Karkat went with an entirely faked growl. “You weird people with your serendipity stuff. You are overlooking our excellent broship.”

                “So, when are you going to admit you’re sleeping together?”

                Karkat, comfortable in the warmth of John’s chest, raised his arm to flip off the general direction of everyone.

               

                It was six years—six years of deep space and unknown planets and being the person who Karkat still felt, sometimes, that he did not deserve to be. Six years before John flopped down next to Karkat on the observation deck, bitching heartily about paperwork. Karkat glanced away from the stars. They were his reward for putting up with the latest crisis in the science department (having been appointed assistant department head gave Karkat so many headaches. Was the whole of space populated by excited four year olds?)

                Karkat grinned at John and shifted over to make room. “Where’s Sollux?” John asked, after they’d exchanged good-natured complaints about generalized stupidity.

                “Off trying to flirt with your head engineer again,” Karkat snorted. It was pretty hilarious to watch. Sollux was completely smitten and Rich was somewhere between confused and entertained by his advances. If Rich thought this crush was going anywhere, he was mistaken. He’d beaten Sollux at hacking. In another sweep or two, Sollux would be fully grown and, if Karkat wasn’t mistaken, unfairly gorgeous. And he would still have his relentless flushcrush on Rich, which was going to be _incredibly_ amusing.

                John snickered too. They watched the stars (screaming, volatile balls of explosive gases and flame that somehow became the source of life and light and beauty to every single world). A companionable silence had taken over—the kind that came with having had a long day and knowing that tomorrow, you’d both still be around for pranking and chattering and bickering yourself red in the face. Karkat ended up looking over at John, struck senseless by warmth and fond affection all over again. Miracles. Home. He was _so happy_. John looked back him, eyes that Karkat never wanted to look away and bent forward slowly. Karkat closed his eyes.

                Their first kiss tasted like mouthwash and tingling and it lasted a long time, a slow exchange of exploration and acceptance. When they parted, Karkat had never blushed so hard in his life, and he kept his hands on John’s cheeks, feeling them heating as well.

                “Too much?” Asked John softly. “I mean—is this too fast?” Their foreheads pressed together like they shared gravity. “…Do we need to talk about it?”

                Karkat laughed. “John. You idiot.”

                “Well, I did kind of cheat,” John pointed out. “I space-married you without really asking. There are rules against that.”

                Yeah, that was like John. A ship for a ring and lives shared completely without the slightest hint of romance—except for the fact that the entire ship had been steadily convinced of their love. Karkat looked up. “You _did_ cheat.”

                John grinned. “Told you.”

                “I want a fucking wedding, you asshole!”

                John cackled, fingers cupping Karkat’s face closer, like when he overflowed, he could be poured into John’s skin and mouth. “I demand bribery.”

                “Fuck you,” Karkat said with feeling, grabbing John by the throat and kissing him hard enough that his head spun, that they both fell over, that they were laughing and tasting and biting all at once, and this was home, he was home, Karkat had never belonged so much in his life. To the stars, John, Sollux, Antenglish, the whole fucking game—

                _I’m home_ , he thought, tears of pure mad fucking joy stinging his eyes. _I’m home, I’m here, wait for me._

                John held him close and wrote it against his skin with his lips and fingers and the sound of his voice curling over Karkat’s name.

                _Welcome. Welcome. Welcome._

**Author's Note:**

> It gives me feelings and is among the fics that needs to--and I mean this in the most loving way possible--get the hell off my computer. I hope it makes some people cry? Is that weird? Yeah, that's weird.  
> Eh.  
> ...Not much else to say, other than I actually kind of like this one.


End file.
